For this exhibition, Lovey Town has become a hideout for tenderness amidst a shifting, scary social and psychological climate in our world. This is a place for compartmentalized affect, little feelings, sad pastel colors, subtle nuance. As these artists have drawn their practices and thought lives down to the intimate scale of the gallery, a love language has formed from material and incident. This syntax of form—an "emotional minimalism"—works against repression, goes underneath the brutish handling of words and people's differences that we witness too often these days. The title is drawn from a passage from Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure, in which a slight, emo-queer boy hero named Orvil carries around a broken saucer in his pocket, “pressing gently against his side,” giving him “a sudden and peculiar pleasure, a feeling of protection in an enemy world.”

Exhibition Series 10: a sudden and peculiar pleasure, a feeling of protection, Spring 2017